This morning Patently Apple discovered a German patent in the European Patent Office as noted below. While the "description of the patent application was made public, the patent figures to assist us understand the patent better were not supplied by Apple or that Apple requested that they not be made public. I tried to get the patent figures from the German patent office without any luck.

Apple Patent title translation: "Face detection, Pose estimate, and estimation of a distance from a camera using a single network"

Apple's Summary states: "A single network on a device is used to encode and decode images captured using a camera on the device (e.g., a mobile device or computer system). The network can judge whether there is a face in the images and, if a face has been detected, judge the position of the face, the pose of the face, and the distance from the face of the camera.

The camera captures infrared images of users who have been illuminated with either flood-infrared lighting or speckle (dot) pattern infrared lighting.

The single network may include a coding module used to generate feature vectors from the image in a feature space, and a decoding module used to decode (classify) the feature vectors to determine if a face is recognized in any of the regions and to judge the additional characteristics of the recognized face."

View the full patent description from the European translation here.

In general the topic of Dot Projection was covered in several U.S. Apple patents such as these – one and two.

Apple's patent application was published in Germany on May 4, 2018 under number DE20201800408 (UI).

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